Wasn’t that book on cats painting shown (or intended) to be bogus?
I realize you’re kidding on some level, but no, I would guess that the elephant has no understanding of what the picture even represents, let alone deciding to draw it spontaneously. It took early humans a long time to get the concept of any depth at all, and this friggin’ elephant plans ahead by drawing the things in the foreground first and then filling in the legs that are partially obscured? Not a chance.
Yeahbut, when humans follow step by step instructions to create visual images, they’re doing the exact same thing. They’re NOT demonstrating a true understanding of spatial relationships, perspective, depth, proportion, etc.
Trying to think of a decent analogy…it’s like heating up a TV dinner and calling that “cooking.” That elephant is just as good at unwrapping a meal and sticking in the oven as any human being would be.
Wheres the protest. An elephant drawing naked pictures. It must be stopped.
I think the main difference is that painting by rote, may, in time, lead to a greater understanding of these principals. But an elephant will always just be going through the motions.
And…? That doesn’t change the fact that the elephant did the painting, itself. Whether it knew what it was drawing or not, it’s still pretty amazing, I’d say.
Exactly!
Not impressed. I think most mammals could be trained to do this.
Elephants are smart animals, and there is evidence that they are self-aware, but this isn’t anything extraordinary.
Yeah I agree with the second part - but as to the first, I just don’t think so.
Working by rote might possibly ignite some curiosity that leads the student to a path of learning about art, but it’ll be a completely different path.
There ARE plenty of people, though, who make and sell products labeled “art” which are, in fact, rote work. I’d refer to them as crafts, myself, I think it’s more honest.
And of course there are also craftspeople who’ve honed their skills to the point where they are most definitely making art. Somehow the term craft is applied based on medium, rather than technique.
Why does everyone assume that this must be a self-portrait? Maybe that’s a sexy nude of the elephant the artist is most attracted to.
Seriously, regardless of how much help or guidance the elephant had, that’s still impressive.
No cite, and I didn’t read all the posts here, but first I heard of this was about 10 years ago. There was an elephant at the San Diego zoo that was bored by its confines, and to amuse itself started laying traps for some birds. (By the way, this was a news program on TV, not some internet hoax posting.) He’d (she’d?) lay down a trail of food that the birds would follow, then he’d try to stomp on them. Out of desperation, the elephant’s trainer came up with the idea of trying to teach the elephant how to paint.
The trainer would put the brushes in the paint and give the brush to the elephant, who’d then paint on the paper.
At first they were very random squiggles. OVer time, the elephant started using its trunk to point to the colors it wanted on the palette, and then started painting what it saw. Extremely abstract, but the colors on the page would be the colors the trainer or some other close by person was wearing that day.
It got to the point where the zoo was selling the paintings for about $10,000 each (I believe they still do) to help fund the zoo.
That’s the last I heard of it, but I guess the idea has spread and other trainers may be doing it now with their elephants? Regardless, that video on the link is amazing. I’m sure the trainer helped, but it’s still pretty damned impressive!
The elephant didn’t know it was drawing? What, is it retarded? Animals aren’t breathing machines who don’t know wtf is going on. By the same token, people aren’t beings of pure intellect. (Unless you’re a creationist, you should know we’re all pretty much the same thing.) For one, a lot of what a human artist does, almost everything, in fact, is repeating what he’s seen and learned. Maybe an elephant is less creative, like a Chinese knockoff manufacturer more prone to imitate than invent. But free thought is actually a much smaller part of the phenomenon of art (or speech or anything else) than most people will admit. Training an animal to do something doesn’t make it “fake” because people need the exact same training to perform. If you take a human who’s never learned anything or communicated with other humans in his life, he’ll be no different from a dog (which is to say, he’ll actually be fairly sophisticated).
Anyway, what really surprises me about these paintings is that they look good. Ie, it’s not just recognizable representations, like what a kid will draw, but something about them is artistically aesthetic. As if the elephant brain has a similar circuit in that respect to a human.
Anyway, what really surprises me about these paintings is that they look good. Ie, it’s not just recognizable representations, like what a kid will draw, but something about them is artistically aesthetic. As if the elephants have a concept of what looks good and what doesn’t, and that that part of their brain acts in a similar way to our own. If the lines were a quarter inch off here or there or with a different flare, the artistic quality would be ruined. I don’t think the elephants could be trained to simply immitate a drawing with such precision. They must be seeing the aesthetics in their drawings, and making tiny adjustments on their own.
Oh sure, I’m impressed what a trained elephant can do with paint and canvas. But today’s artists need to become familiar with the tools on a computer. I’d like to see what it could do with a mouse…
[pause for revelation]
Oh, that’s right, they’re afraid of mice! Good luck with all that.
I dunno. I think there’s something to be said about how the human mind can abstract. Sure, art and technique can certainly be learned (by elephants, no less!), but to create the original idea or design in the first place is not something trivial.
I agree that this painting isn’t a “fake” as most people understand, and I think it deserves the recognition as something pretty damn impressive. But there is a difference between someone just going through the motions, as opposed to someone improvising on the spot; in humans, as well as with elephants.
The fact alone the animal can paint with such dexterity at all, is frickin’ amazing. If, however, it were to come up with the imagery on its own, then we’d be in a completely different realm, and would have to adjust our thinking of what we know about animal minds, comprehension and self-awareness to an astounding degree. It’s obvious these painting don’t prove the latter. But still…
If an elephant spontaneously drew that, it would indeed by mind-blowing. Not least because a human could never spontaneously draw that. Cave paintings were not spontaneous (in the sense they were an evolution of sand drawing or body painting) and were fairly ugly. The very first thing a human would draw who’s never been exposed to any visual art would be a crappy doodle.
I think the real big difference between a human and an elephant is that a human wants to doodle, and an elephant needs an incentive. That’s the only fact that underlies this “spontaneous art” idea. A fair distinction, sure, but not the big one that others claim exists. No creature can spontaneously create art that looks good.
(And by ‘good’, of course, I mean good to anyone but himself. In fact, ‘good’ is not an absolute, but a mere standard that must be learned and adhered to. Any human creativity that looks good works within a standard and tries to find new ways of obeying the standard while being different. That, in unspiring terms, is what artistic expression is. If elephants can perceive aesthetic standards, which is what I argued they could in my previous post, then they, automatically, are capable of creativity as long as, by trial and error, they can discover various compositions that also fit those standards.)
Missed the edit window, as I wanted to touch on this a little further.
We can’t be entirely sure the elephant didn’t know what it was drawing in the sense that, after the Hong goes through all the learned strokes, does it know [grok] that it just painted an elephant holding a flower? Or to the elephant, does it come across to him/her as an organized bunch of lines?
Not that it’s retarded, I think that’s anthropomorphizing way too much. We just don’t know what kind of mental power is being displayed here. As said, it’s one thing to draw, but an entirely different thing to know what that drawing is.
Imagine you were abducted by aliens far more mentally superior to us. They figured out you could speak, draw, and even build things. So they give you a bunch of complicated parts, and through rudimentary communication, are able to train you how to build something very complex to your human mind. They all applaud you after you’re done building it. But do you know what you’ve just built? You can argue, that sure, after you’re done turning it on, you can just see what it does. But what if whatever the device does makes absolutely no sense to you, in a way that you just can’t wrap your comprehension around. Such is the painting elephant?
Hrmm. I argue that comprehension is creativity. Or at least creativity is informed by comprehension.
Also, just because primitive man didn’t create art like Michael Angelo, doesn’t mean he didn’t have the capacity to do so. Art throughout mankind is a grand evolution. The idea, at all, to draw something of meaning or abstraction (in the sense of art or technology) has never been known to originate from animals.
Might you be arguing that maybe over time, the mighty elephant might be creating true inspired works of art and technology? Will its elephant peers recognize such works? Will it evolve?
Some of the arguments here are verging towards the Chinese Room argument.
If what cmyk outlined in post #37 is indeed what is going on here, then that would require that the animal had to have been trained to execute very precise strokes (which would mean dozens of file-drawered failed canvases which we would never see) in basically the same way each time. I have no idea how you would go about doing that-heck I have no idea how you would train a human child (c. 6-8 years old-the elephant in the video appears to be an older juvenile) to maintain balance and such when freepainting no matter how many times you had them paint over lines as a means of training. The kid probably would eventually balk at what would be a very boring and repetitive task.
But until we see an interview of the trainers here where they explicitly outline the exact training procedure, I have no choice but to suspend judgement in the interim.
Yes, but it’s almost never been known to originate with humans. If humans developed the concept of drawing (at a guess; does anyone know the actual number?) two or three times independently, and elephants have developed the concept independently zero times, that might mean that humans are better at that sort of activity than are elephants, or it might just mean that we got luckier than they did.